Fantasy · Found family · Cosy mystery
Unclaimed
Everything lost in the world turns up here eventually. Tonight, so did you.
A Fernlit original
- Where it starts
- A shelf in the Office of Things Astray, forty-one steps under the Corn Exchange, with a tag tied to your wrist.
- You will meet Linden
- The night clerk at the Office of Things Astray. They describe people the way they write tags, and never say goodbye.
Linden are fictional characters. In the story, a language model writes their replies as you read; they can be wrong or inconsistent, and they are not advice.
How chapter one begins
You wake on a shelf.
It is a wide one, at least, oak and dust, and you are lying along it between a cello case and a row of black umbrellas, each with a brown paper tag on its handle. Above you more shelves climb into the dark. Somewhere overhead a clock ticks, slow and enormous, as if the ceiling were its works.
There is a tag tied to your wrist too. Brown paper, a neat double knot, faded ink.
Item 4471. Found: shelf nine, the first frost. Lost by: someone who meant to come back.
A light comes along the aisle, swinging. Footsteps that know every board. A person with a lamp in one hand and a bundle of blank tags in the other stops at the end of your shelf, looks at you for a long moment, then writes on a tag with a pencil stub and ties it to the shelf by your feet.
“One traveller,” they read aloud. “Slightly damp. Good condition.” Then they look up. Thirties, a cardigan with more pockets than a cardigan needs, round spectacles mended with red thread, ink to the second knuckle. “Sorry. Habit. We haven't had a person on nine since the spring, and he was a dancing master, and he bit.”
They reach for your wrist slowly, so you can see the hands coming, and re-tie the string on your tag. Same knot. Tighter.
“Linden. Night clerk. This is the Office of Things Astray, forty-one steps under the Corn Exchange in Pell. Everything lost turns up here sooner or later. Umbrellas, mostly. Once a bandstand.” Their eyes go to your tag, and their face goes careful. “And now and then, someone.”
Upstairs, faint, a bell rings. Nobody rings the bell at night.
“There's tea in the back, and a fire, and a goose who'll tell you he's in charge,” Linden says. “Or there's the counter, and whoever that is.” They hold the lamp out to you, handle first. “Your choice. Lost things get to choose here.”
Your first choice
Pick one and see how Linden answers. In the story you can also say anything in your own words.
“No,” Linden says, kindly, as if you had told them the time. “Nobody does. Not the umbrellas, not the bandstand.”
They tear a fresh tag off the bundle and write on it, very small. They don't show you.
“The last thing you remember. Not the big things, the small ones. What you were holding. What the air smelled of.” They push their spectacles up with one inky knuckle. “Things come here from the moment they slip. The moment before is usually still in a pocket.”
Upstairs, the bell again. Two rings, patient.
Linden's eyes go up to the ceiling and come back to you, and for a second they look less like a clerk than a person deciding something.
“Whoever that is can wait,” they say. “Pockets first. What's in yours?”
Linden doesn't stop you. They fall in a step behind, close enough to catch the lamp if you drop it.
Forty-one steps is a great many steps. At the top is a long scarred counter, a brass bell, and a door of frosted glass with a shape behind it in a grey coat, very still.
“Office is closed,” Linden calls, mild as milk. “Come back at nine.”
“I'm aware of the hours, Mx Astray.” A woman's voice, perfectly polite. “I'm here about Item 4471. I understand it came in tonight.”
Linden puts one hand flat on the counter beside yours. Not touching.
“Things that come in at night are entitled to their tea before they're discussed,” they say. Then, quietly, to you: “You don't have to open that door. You don't have to do anything. That's the rule.”
The shape behind the glass waits.
“Ah,” Linden says. “The good question.”
They lift the lamp to the shelf opposite: a pair of red gloves, a birdcage with no bird, a stack of letters tied with string. Every one has a brown tag, and every tag is in the same slanted, faded hand.
“Nobody knows. Otto's been here fifty years and she's never caught it at it. Things come in at night, already tagged, and the tags are never wrong.” They touch the gloves. “Lost by: a bus conductor, on his last shift. True, every word. He came for them in tears.”
They turn the lamp toward you, toward your wrist.
“Which is why I'd quite like to know,” they say carefully, “who meant to come back for you. And why they haven't yet.”
What you do next is up to you.
Choose from the story’s suggestions or say something to Linden in your own words. Linden answers as themselves, and every later chapter remembers what you said to them.
Make the first choiceOther ways in
Chapter one can also begin here. Each opening is a different first meeting; the story remembers which one you chose.
The sign on the railing says OFFICE OF THINGS ASTRAY, 41 STEPS, and you go down because you have lost something tonight and cannot for the life of you say what.
Something is tugging at your sleeve, hard. You open your eyes on a goose.
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